Mutually Assured Delusion

Diplomacy gave us intensified uranium enrichment, not peace

This will be an unpopular thing to say, but here it is: in bombing Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, the United States and Israel have done the world a favour.

I say this not as a supporter of President Trump—whose erratic instincts have often imperilled the very world order he now purports to protect, and whose unfitness for office I have decried endlessly on this publication—nor of Benjamin Netanyahu, whose authoritarian drift, domestic repression and horrendous miscalculation, aggression and hubris in Gaza have been well documented. I say it as someone who has grown tired of the West’s consolatory fictions, tired of the decade-long diplomatic theatre in which we pretend that there is a clean line between civilian nuclear power and nuclear weapons.

There isn’t. There never has been.

The capacity to enrich uranium to fuel a power reactor is, by definition, the capacity to enrich it further—to weapons-grade levels. Once the centrifuges are installed and the process is mastered, the only thing separating a nuclear energy program from a nuclear bomb is intent. In Iran’s case, that intent has never been in doubt.

Iran is ruled not by cautious men, but by a fanatical theocratic regime whose Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, governs with the divine infallibility of a medieval monarch and the ideological certainty of an apocalyptic cult. This is not a regime that can be expected to operate under the grim but stable logic of mutually assured destruction. That doctrine works—if it ever truly did—only when both parties are committed to survival. But what becomes of deterrence when martyrdom is valorised? What becomes of the nuclear standoff when one side believes annihilation is a gateway to glory?

There has been no greater agitator against peace in the Middle East than the Islamic Republic of Iran. Its funding and arming of Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Hamas has done more to destabilise the region than any Western military intervention of the past two decades. These aren’t humanitarian organisations; they are radical Islamic militias animated by the same revolutionary fervour that drives the Iranian regime itself. They export bloodshed, not balance.

Despite the performative hand-wringing from some Gulf capitals, there is little doubt that the Sunni monarchies—Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan—are breathing a quiet sigh of relief. Their public caution belies a private truth: that their Shia rivals, long empowered by Tehran’s ideological and military reach, are being strategically defanged.

And the implications stretch beyond the Middle East. A crippled Iran means a weakened Russia. Moscow’s relationship with Tehran has become a lifeline—an axis of autocracy through which arms, oil, and drones pass freely, allowing both regimes to blunt the edge of Western sanctions. Every pressure point applied to Iran reverberates through the Kremlin’s own system of circumvention.

Critics of this strike will claim that diplomatic solutions were not given a chance. This is a fantasy. Peaceful means have exclusively defined the West’s approach to Iran for decades. At every turn, the regime has played for time—pretending moderation while expanding its centrifuge capacity and deepening its uranium reserves. Today, Iran possesses one of the largest stockpiles of enriched uranium in the world. Its officials still insist they do not want a nuclear weapon, even as they deny UN inspectors access to half their enrichment facilities and publicly violate every assurance ever given to the international community.

Iranian dissident Masih Alinejad wrote in response to the Israeli strike that reportedly killed IRGC commander Hossein Salami 10 days ago:

“Removing a terrorist is not a tragedy, it is a step toward justice for all the innocent lives they destroyed… The Islamic Republic built its empire on violence, and now that violence is coming back to strike its core… This regime never wanted peace. It wanted impunity.”

Alinejad’s words, for once, cut through the fog of diplomatic equivocation. While Western negotiators talked enrichment caps and inspection timelines, the Islamic Republic jailed women for dancing, hanged protesters from cranes, and stockpiled 60% enriched uranium to use as geopolitical blackmail. It responded to every IAEA concern and U.S. outreach not with cooperation, but with threats. This was not a misunderstood actor. It was a calculated threat—to the region, to its own people, and to the truth.

This, therefore, is not a case of diplomacy bypassed. It is diplomacy exhausted. It is the consequence of a Western foreign policy establishment that allowed itself to be serially humiliated by a regime it kept hoping would change. The regime didn’t change. It got stronger. And it brought us here.

There will be consequences. There always are. But we should not overstate them. Iran’s capacity to retaliate—directly or by proxy—has been badly diminished. Its economy is in tatters. Its leadership is ageing and brittle. And its network of client militias, once the great export of its revolutionary doctrine, is in disarray. Hezbollah has never truly recovered from Israel’s devastating 2024 supply chain assassination, in which personal pagers smuggled to senior commanders detonated simultaneously across southern Lebanon. That single strike neutralised Hezbollah’s upper echelon and left the group powerless to defend the Assad regime in Syria, precipitating its collapse. The Houthis, for all their disruptive capacity in the Red Sea, remain geographically limited. Hamas, isolated and decimated, is a shadow of its former self.

For the first time in decades, Iran and its proxies are collectively weakened. That is not an argument against action—it is the argument for it. The cost of waiting was always going to be higher than the cost of acting. And the window was closing.

Let me be clear: the path to peace from here is narrow, and in no way guaranteed. There is every chance that this intervention triggers unintended consequences, and anyone promising tidy outcomes in the Middle East is selling fiction. But let us also be honest about limits. Any attempt to extend this into a broader military campaign—let alone pursue regime change in Iran—would be not only futile, but reckless. The United States cannot and should not attempt such an objective. But as it stands today, just two days after the strikes on Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, this limited tactical intervention was necessary. And if it has truly succeeded in crippling Iran’s nuclear weapons program—as President Trump has claimed, though we won’t know with certainty for days, weeks, or months—then it has been, however paradoxically, an act in service of peace.

Many observers have pointed out, not incorrectly, that the United States and Israel are not aligned on everything. Trump has made it clear that his red line is nuclear weapon development alone. Israel’s red line extends further—encompassing Iran’s ballistic missile stockpile, its funding of terror militias, and its explicit threats to Israeli existence. The difference is geography. America is an ocean away. Israel is within reach of every Iranian missile.

So yes, this was an act of war. But it was also an act of clarity. A line has been drawn—at last—between fantasy and reality, between hopes and facts, between the comforts of diplomatic euphemism and the costs of strategic neglect. The world may flinch, but the world should also remember: peace is not the absence of conflict. Sometimes, peace is the absence of a nuclear Ayatollah.